Medusa's Children

CHAPTER FIVE

As a member of the Artisan family, Myrah was given responsibility for the habitat in which the volunteers would sleep.

It was basically an air net which was roomy enough to contain several humans, and its mechanical components consisted of two pumps and a large collapsible cage for the trapping of free air bubbles. The pumps themselves were cylindrical devices with a system of valves which allowed water to be expelled alternately from each side of a piston. Bands of stringweed were attached to both faces of the piston. As soon as one strip of weed was deprived of water it contracted powerfully, causing the piston to move under its action and, at the limit of its travel, water was admitted to that section of the cylinder. The stringweed then relaxed, just as the opposing band was drying and contracting, and the piston was drawn to the other end of its stroke. Although slow in operation, pumps of this type were reliable and efficient at maintaining a slight positive air pressure in the Home’s various living spaces.

The portable habitat was designed to allow small groups of humans to sleep in a reasonable degree of security while away from the Home on long journeys. One of its pumps was an air intake and the other, positioned at the opposite side of the net, expelled the air again at a slightly lesser rate. This arrangement resulted in sufficient air pressure to keep the net inflated, and also created an air flow which ensured that the people within did not asphyxiate in their sleep. In the virtual absence of gravity there was no convection to carry warm, used air away from a sleeper, and one of the most common dangers facing a human was that of falling asleep in a zone of still air and being smothered in a cloud of his own exhalations.

Myrah slept very badly on the night before departure.

She had purposely worked until she was very tired, hoping to induce swift unconsciousness, but the enormity of what was going to happen in the morning was too great. Time and time again she drifted into uneasy dozes, only to dream about tumbling downwards into the darkness where Ka was waiting. When she awoke there was momentary relief at having escaped from the nightmare, then came the pounding realisation that the nightmare had become reality and that it had scarcely yet begun. In the end she was almost glad to see that morning had come, because it meant that the events of the dream scenarios would have to be enacted only once more.

She looked around the dormitory in the slow-gathering light and saw that the other women of the family were still asleep. Myrah undid her own tether and quietly left the room. Controlling her flight by briefly touching the moisture-beaded walls with hands or feet, she made her way along a corridor to the main room. She had been hoping to get away without saying goodbye to anybody, but was gratified nevertheless to find that Lilee, the Family Mother, was waiting for her.

The old woman embraced Myrah silently before handing her a bladder of fresh water and a twist of salted white fish wrapped in edible moss. Myrah did not feel like eating, but rather than offend Lilee she bit off some of the raw fish and forced herself to chew it.

“Your mother was a strange one, too,” Lilee said, watching Myrah intently.

“I don’t remember her.”

“You’ve only to look at yourself and you’ll know what your mother was like.” Lilee’s grey hair floated lazily around her head. It had been allowed to grow long because she was too old to leave the house, and therefore never had to wear a bubble cage. Clan members who went out into the water always cropped their hair short to prevent it displacing valuable air from the cages strapped to their heads.

“Why do you say she was strange?” Myrah squeezed some water from the bladder into her mouth.

“She was always restless. Always questioning things.”

“Like me, you mean.”

“Yes. And she would have offered to go down, too.”

Myrah tried to imagine an earlier version of herself, troubled with the same discontentment, whose life had been brought to a dose by illness before any of her questions had been answered, and for a moment she was almost glad she was venturing into the darkness. It would be better to die as a result of one’s own actions, in pursuit of a cause, than wait passively to fall victim to one of the casual killers, the diseases which so frequently decimated the Clan.

“I have to go now,” she said.

“God go with you.” Lilee came towards her, arms outstretched, and during the embrace Myrah was surprised to discover that the older woman was weeping. She felt a pang of guilt over the fact that to her Lilee was just another person, that she had done nothing to develop the bond of intimacy which existed between the other females and their House Mother. The failure on her part was all the greater because her natural mother had died so early in her life.

“They’ll be waiting for me.” Myrah broke free and went out into the corridor without looking back. Facing her was a structure which some Clan people called a stair—two inclined beams spanned by a series of horizontal flat surfaces—the purpose of which she had never been able to understand. She flew upwards above it, guiding herself by a rope which was passed through thin vertical posts, and emerged from the house into the blue light of the morning. Unfastening her bubble cage from her belt, she spread its petals and strapped it to her head. There was nobody to be seen in the airy vastness of the Home’s central volume, something for which Myrah was glad. She kicked off from the metal rim of the Artisan house and flew upwards through a thin webwork of ropes towards the Topeast entrance. Going through the clinging folds of the air net, she entered the water with full lungs and swam the short distance to the portal in the defensive net.

Lennar and Geean were already in the sentry’s bubble, and she could see other figures in the water beyond. The scene very much resembled the one which had greeted her at the same place only a day earlier, but the visual similarity served to accentuate the grim difference in the circumstances. As soon as the trio had touched bodies in greeting, Lennar handed Myrah a metal bubble cage of the kind used by hunters. It was a non-collapsing type, constructed of thick copper strips, designed to resist impacts and crushing pressures, and had an extra strap which passed beneath the chin. Myrah strapped it on in place of her own, tucking the latter into a storage net to await her return.

“There’s the habitat,” Lennar said in a businesslike voice, indicating a transport bag tied to the opposite side of the sphere. “Give it a final check.”

He went outside before she could reply. Myrah nodded without resentment, aware that Lennar had shouldered a heavy burden of responsibility when Solman had put him in charge of the expedition. She undid the ties of the transport bag and began inspecting the air pumps and spare components within. Geean hovered nearby, looking impossibly thin and childlike for one who was about to take part in such a dangerous mission. Myrah was certain that Solman had made a mistake in accepting her, even though—as soon as his required six had gone forward—the remainder of the Clan had felt the onus lifted from them and no others had made the gesture of volunteering.

“I like Lennar,” Geean said, obviously anxious to break the silence.

“Is that why you’re going with him?” Myrah did not interrupt her work. “You’re a fool if it is.”

“Of course not.” Geean sounded hurt. “Didn’t Caro mean anything to you?”

“Not much.” Myrah was deliberately callous. “In any case, getting myself killed wouldn’t help her. You need a better reason than that.”

“Perhaps I’ve got one,” Geean said, and something in her voice caused Myrah to look up at her. The younger girl’s face looked more immature than ever when surrounded by the metal framework of a hunter’s bubble cage. Her eyes met Myrah’s in timorous challenge.

“I didn’t mean to be rough on you,” Myrah said in softer tones. “It’s just that you’re so young and it seems such a….”

“I’ve begun to cough,” Geean interrupted in a low voice.

“Oh! I….” Myrah discovered, as had happened to her many times in the past, that there was very little one could say to a friend who confesses she is dying. “I’m sorry, Geean. Perhaps it’s just a flux.”

“No—it hurts too much.”

Myrah retied the transport bag. “Then you should stay in the Home.”

“Please, Myrah.” Geean caught her arm. “Don’t tell Lennar.”

“But if….”

“There hasn’t been any blood. There’ll be no danger for anybody.”

Myrah shook her head in doubt. “But what if it starts? You could bring sharks or razorfins or hagfish in among us.”

“I’ll be all right for a few days, at least.” Geean caught Myrah’s other arm and they floated in the blue morning light, face to face, almost like lovers. “Myrah, I don’t want to stay in there and just wait and wait. You can understand that, can’t you?”

Myrah smiled. “I can understand that.”

“Then you won’t tell?”

“No.”

“Thank you.” Geean closed with her, awkwardly because of the bulk of the metal cages, and they clung together for a moment. Although the difference in their ages was only six years, Myrah felt as if she was comforting a small child, and her sense of the futility and unfairness of life returned in greater force than before. Instinct told her there had been a ghastly mistake somewhere—when a girl of Geean’s age was grateful for the chance of a quick death—but her intellect told her that this was the inescapable human situation, and to hope for anything else was to be as naïve as those who talked about God and a life after that final rendezvous with Ka.

“We’d better go outside,” she said gently.

Geean nodded, wiping her eyes, and they went out through the folds of the entrance. Lennar was waiting with the other three members of the party—Treece, the mature and strongly built woman from the Netmaker family, Harld and another young hunter named Dan who both appeared to see participation in the journey as a quick means of achieving full adult status. Harld had announced he was going for no other reason than to escape the nursery watch, but Myrah had not been deceived, and knowing the life expectancy of a hunter she did not blame him for being in a hurry to claim the sparse privileges available. Treece and Dan were two members of the Clan whom Myrah did not know well, but she guessed each was driven by a private desperation as great as her own, and perhaps even as great as Geean’s.

For the purposes of what could prove to be a long excursion the group had been provided with a strong net in which to carry supplies of food and water, extra weapons and equipment, and a limited range of medicaments. Holding her breath, Myrah swam to it and put the rolled-up habitat inside. When she turned away to capture a free bubble she realised at once that the mysterious current had grown noticeably more powerful. The glimmering shoals of bubbles were migrating downwards like purposeful living creatures, and the six humans were actually having to tread water to maintain their positions with respect to the Topeast entrance.

Accustomed though she was to a zero-energy environment in which objects could usually be relied upon to remain stationary, Myrah began to get an inkling of the forces which were dragging at the Home. All the while Lennar was marshalling his little army and reminding them of necessary precautions, she stared at the haphazard slopes which curved away into the limits of visibility, for the first time seeing the Home as nothing more than a gigantic sac which might have been attached to the root columns by some unthinkable creature caring for its larvae. It dismayed her to realise that something as important as human life depended on a conglomeration of metal houses, nets and ropes retaining its precarious unity.

“That’s it,” Lennar said unceremoniously. “We’ll go now.”

A sentry who had been holding the supply net in place released it and retired back into the Topeast entrance with a wave of his arm. The bundle began to sink downwards at once and the group, taking hold, of trailing ropes, formated on it. They swam slowly, scarcely exceeding the speed of the drift, to avoid adding a vector of their own to the motion induced by the current. Myrah was relieved to find that, as soon as they moved off, it was again easy to capture air bubbles. She swam automatically, mainly using her legs, her left hand gripping a rope and the other holding a tubular spear at the ready.

The six humans kept to a strict defensive pattern, facing outwards, three of them swimming upside down in relation to the others for complete surveillance of their surroundings. They knew that as they moved down into the dysphotic zone their disadvantages would increase, especially in comparison to the Horra, whose large and well-developed eyes made them admirably suited to a predatory existence in perpetual dimness.

There were other deadly enemies at those levels, particularly the eel-like hagfish and several varieties of ray, but the Horra were feared most of all because of what seemed to be a malign intelligence and the ghastly nature of their attack. A male Horra had ten tentacles, one of which also served as a penis—hunters sometimes saw them in copulation, the female’s body gripped in a horrid simulation of a fist by the male’s other tentacles, while the sexual arm probed into her mantle. The dread these creatures inspired in humans sprang largely from the fact that the sexual arm was also used as a weapon against them, being driven into the victim’s body with lethal force.

Nobody in the Clan knew for certain if this was a standard killing technique used indiscriminately by the Horra against all vulnerable species, or if some element in the shape or scent of humans incited them to the grisly form of rape. What was only too well known was that, even when armed and trained, a human needed ice-cold nerves to survive an attack by a Horra—and that even the bravest individual could succumb to a deadly paralysis of mind and body in the actual event.

Like all other adult members of the Clan, Myrah had suffered nightmares about the Horra, and now—as she sank further into their kingdom—she fought, while maintaining the utmost vigilance, to reassure herself that none would be encountered. As the group followed the current down towards the abyssal core of the world, the light intensity gradually decreased and the colours red and green faded away completely. The swimmers saw their bodies as bluish shapes on which all features were drawn in black.

After three hours of the slow but continuous movement Myrah knew they were passing beyond the limit of any previous human exploration, and tension began to gather inside her. This was increased by the fact that the root columns, familiar backdrop to every facet of her life, began to thin out into occasional tapering tendrils. Finally they were left behind altogether, and the swimmers were descending through an unbounded universe of dark blue twilight. Although the root structures offered hiding places for enemies as well as for humans, Myrah felt dangerously exposed in the agoraphobic expanses of dim water. It disturbed her, too, to realise that the giant roots did not go on for ever and were, in fact, merely plants like all the other vegetation which grew near the surface. An alarming new thought occurred to her.

“I’m lost already,” she said to Lennar. “How will we find our way back?”

“I’ll take care of that.” His voice, propagated clearly in the still waters, was unnaturally loud.

“I don’t see how.”

“Perhaps you should try to see, in case something happens to me. Have you noticed that the current has changed direction?”

“No.” Myrah looked all around her, but in the absence of spatial referents found it difficult even to identify up and down. “Which way are we going?”

“We’ve stopped going straight down and are swinging to the east. Keep looking upwards every now and again. Learn to spot the centre of brightness and take your bearings from it.”

Myrah looked in the direction he was indicating and was just about able to differentiate the upper and lower hemispheres of her surroundings. “I’m not much good at this.”

“Neither am I,” Treece put in from the opposite side of the group.

“All right,” Lennar said. “Perhaps we’d better inflate the habitat and have something to eat. The three hunters will hold it at this level for a while and give your eyes a better chance to adapt.”

While Lennar, Harld and Dan held the supply net in place against the action of the current, Myrah unshipped the habitat. She spread the curved petals of its bubble collector to form a dish and started the intake pump by blowing water out of one end of its cylinder. Holding the habitat in place in moving water had the effect of increasing the efficiency of the bubble collector and in a short time the fabric balloon was fully inflated. Myrah went into it, rounded up some trembling globes of water—bubbles in reverse—which were floating about inside and ushered them out through the entrance folds to become one with the surrounding water. She then started up the exhaust pump, satisfied herself that the pressure differential was being maintained, and signalled to the others that her task was completed. Treece came in at once with a bladder of fresh water and some food wrapped in a waterproof skin.

“It’s nice in here,” she said, glancing appreciatively around the dim sphere of the habitat. “Just like being inside an egg.”

“Depends on whether you like the idea of being inside an egg,” Myrah replied in a neutral voice.

“True.” Treece unwrapped a twist of kingfish meat and tore a piece off with her teeth. “I’ve been watching you, Myrah—you seem very nervous.”

“Nervous?” Myrah pretended to consider the word for a moment. “Perhaps it’s because I don’t like the idea of being eaten.”

Treece chewed comfortably for a moment. “Why did you volunteer to come?”

“Somebody had to do it.”

“But not you.”

Myrah took the bladder of water and drank from it to give herself time to think. Until this minute she had exchanged less than a dozen words with Treece in her whole life, but the other woman appeared to have a degree of insight which she found disconcerting. Myrah began to wonder why they had had so little previous contact, especially as there was a functional link between the Artisan and Netmaker families.

“Aren’t you afraid?” she said.

“I don’t want to be eaten, either—but this is a chance that probably won’t come up again.”

Myrah felt a disturbing premonition. “A chance for what?”

“To see Ka, of course. To find out for certain.”

Myrah suddenly knew why she and Treece had lived separate lives in spite of the close confines of the Home. Members of the Ka-worshipping sect were not exactly ostracised—humans faced too many common dangers to be able to afford disunity—but their dark religion created certain barriers to communication. The basic tenet was that Ka, being unimaginably huge and powerful in proportion, could have sought out and engulfed the human colony at any time—and the fact that he had chosen not to do so proved that he was benignly disposed to the people of the Clan.

Myrah was prepared to admit this as a point for discussion, although her own belief was that Ka was immobile, in some way anchored at the centre of the world, or totally indifferent to anything going on in the upper levels. But she objected to the elaborate myths, supposedly based on the account of a remote ancestor, ascribing to Ka fantastic powers which included the ability to absorb other beings, still alive, into his own body and then send them abroad as his servants. In particular, she disliked the notion that dead humans, after their gradual descent into darkness, were assimilated by Ka and partially revitalised, thus achieving a kind of afterlife. Myrah preferred to regard death as a clean and final exit from the rigours of existence.

“Why did you wait so long?” she said, concealing the unease that Treece inspired in her. “You could have swum down at any time. A lot faster than we’re going now.”

“I did start out once, then I realised I would never have found my way back. There’d be no point if I couldn’t get back with the word.”

“Perhaps Ka would have shown you the way.”

Treece laughed delightedly. “I like that. You know, you’re intelligent enough to be one of us.”

“I’ll stay as I am.”

“I know—but perhaps something will happen to make you change your mind.”

Myrah shook her head. “I doubt it. Besides, it looks as though we’re not going down much further. The current is changing direction.”

“That’s because the world turns round,” Treece said with calm conviction. “Currents have to flow in curves, but you’ll find this one goes deep.”

Myrah tried to think of a reply which would make her sound unimpressed and unconcerned, but in the pervasive dimness of the dysphotic zone it was strangely difficult to rally her spirit against the other woman’s mental attack. That night, because of the way the guard rota worked out, she found herself sharing the habitat during her sleep period with Lennar and Harld. They came to her at separate times with silent advances of love, and she accepted on each occasion, glad of the reassurance that life, too, was a force beyond the comprehension of individuals.